A Note on Memories (and other things you didn’t appreciate)

I’m never really all that comfortable. I find myself saying that a lot, but don’t really know what I mean by it. It has something to do with an inner hum I suffer from, or am lucky to have. Either way, it’s not a feeling of ease. It’s something alive, a force that needs to be shouldered against. A beast that needs to be fed to be held at bay. It is a ticking clock, a pulling and tightening of the muscles. A poke at the back of the neck that keeps my feet moving fast.

I have bad dreams sometimes. I remember when I was little, my bad dreams consisted of various monsters, or being lost far from home. Now I have bad dreams about missing deadlines, or being told that something just isn’t good enough. Doesn’t cut it. Didn’t make it. We won’t be needing this. This just isn’t working out. In my adult nightmares, I am made aware that “something is out there” — and waking up doesn’t make it go away.

The few times that I am comfortable, that I snap to attention and realize “Oh my God, nothing is wrong right now,” have such a short expiration date once realized, that I choke on them. I horde them in huge handfuls and stuff them down so fast that I don’t even taste them. “That was comfort,” I tell myself “and now we’re out of it.”

I had a discussion recently with an old friend regarding relationships and how they happen. I was remembering a time when they used to be so easy for me. Years would go by, just me and this other person, and it would take months and months before we even had one negative thing to say about each other. Now months and months are a luxury. My friend was telling me that she has never been good at relationships, and wondered how it can be that there always seems to be one person out of the two who cares more. Gives more. Wants more. I think that’s because the other person has such huge holes in them, they just take longer to fill up. An ocean of hurt that will accept things, then drown them.

I moved from Southern California to Illinois when I was 20. When you’ve lived somewhere so long, it’s easy to think of it as being the only place there is. You take advantage of its beauty. I have vivid memories of being on car trips with my parents and having my Mom turn to me in the back seat and tell me “Look out the windows at the mountains, it’s so pretty,” and me being like “Yeah, whatever,” giving not even a second glance to views that I’d give anything to see now. Vast rolling hills of wildflowers and looming orange and brown mountains giving high fives to willowy silhouettes of palm trees and I felt nothing for them. Because they were there for me. They were everywhere. It was expected. And now I miss them.

My last real relationship was over a year ago. She lived in the city and I lived in the suburbs and would spend time with her every weekend. I would look forward to our time together all week, but some weekends were better than others. Sometimes I would meet my girlfriend at the coffee shop she worked at and immediately huff and puff about who knows what. Stupid things that didn’t mean anything at all. I would see her smile fade and her eyes start to get that look like “Oh no, here we go,” and before our visit even really began, in my mind, I had already ruined it. I’d fight within myself to keep chipper and have a good time until I drove back home, and comforted myself with the thought that next weekend would be better. Next weekend I’ll be in a better mood and we’ll have the best time ever. There are no more “next weekends.”

We want to all believe that we love the things we have and the people we have in our lives. But really, we love what we *don’t* have. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” are phrases that can all be tattooed to our foreheads, and we’ll never realize just how true those sayings are. It is work to stay interested in something. It takes work to maintain attention once attention is given to something. Practice does not make perfect, it makes things invisible. Repetition dulls the edges of situations we are in and then once we’re no longer in those situations, all those details come flooding back like a bad dream and we know in one harsh in-take of breath exactly what was lost.

Maybe there’s something to be said for not ever having it “too easy.” In the sick patterns I find my life taking these days, I take pleasure in all the downfalls and losses, because they make the wins that much sweeter. After awhile though it’s hard to enjoy the sweet when you’ve gotten such a taste for the bitter. Either way, don’t ever get too comfortable.